Wireless digital communications systems are poised to offer a cost-effective alternative to cable and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technologies or data services. One example of wireless digital communications systems is the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access technology, or so called “WiMAX” technology. The WiMAX technology is based on the IEEE 802.16e air interface standard and is a promising framework for broadband wireless applications. WiMAX has the potential to enable full internet and digital voice services for both fixed and mobile users.
The WiMAX network architecture includes a subscriber station (SS) that communicates with a base station (BTS) via a wireless link or interface. The BTS includes PHY and media access controller (MAC) functionality, where PHY functionality takes care of encoding and decoding between a pure digital domain and a modulation in the analog domain. The BTS can be a multiple-sector BTS in which each sector is served with one or more antennas. The conventional WiMAX network architecture partitions the set of all BTS receive antennas between the different sectors. A network with twelve receive antennas, for example, supports each of three different sectors by allocating the twelve receive antennas into three sets of four receive antennas per set, with each antenna set assigned or allocated to support one sector. However, this receive antenna allocation scheme reduces the uplink (UL) capacity of the network because in operation each sector only has available to it the use of a subset of the total number of available receive antennas (e.g. each sector only has use of four receive antennas even though the BTS is coupled to twelve receive antennas in the example above). Consequently, there is a need for a wireless communication system in which the antenna allocation scheme allows all BTS antennas to be used to receive SS communications in any sector.